Columbia has this contemporary civilization program – western philosophy and political thought. The professor I keep in touch with recommended Anton Mesmer.

The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil—these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this...

Caius was one of those who gloried in his ignorance, called his lack of letters purity, scorned any subtlety of thought or expression. A man for his time, indeed.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'” he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. “That’s it—foam, and fleeting. All man’s toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the...

If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(…) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same...

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to...

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere...

Your country is beautiful, a virtual paradise.” When will the people of Indonesia be as beautiful as their land, with a civilization and culture that contributes to the greater beauty of humankind and no longer...

Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.

The times do not call for grassroots political activism, as if the next election might be enough to reverse a massive cultural earthquake. They do not call for working just a little bit harder: a...

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artist’s power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.

An inventor is a person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. ‘Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!’ we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should...

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough...

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did...

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen...

[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven’t known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would...

Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one’s society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In...

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily...

(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): ‘I think it would be a good idea.

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?”I laughed. “Civilization?”He nodded, splaying his fingers: amusement. “Yes,” he said. “Speaking with hands is civilization.””But smiling is natural,” I protested. “Everyone smiles.””Natural is...

The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.

I can’t tell you why I was in love with her. People didn’t require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and – and clear. You...

If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot’s brutal feet. Husbands should divorce...

If kissing is man’s greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man’s worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing...

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable … They do not create scenes over a hammer or a...

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given...

Cultures that do not wish to exist cannot be dissuaded from destroying themselves.

We only refer to sapient creatures as civilized when their society is willingly self-correcting. That means that any problem or imbalance that arises is fixed, and I mean really fixed – not ignored, not hidden,...

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each...

He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an...

Civilization — a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.”-Vergere

so it will become a model of civilization for the rest of the world.

The civilized man is technologically ahead of — intellectually behind — his time.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways...

The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They’re rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you...

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property...

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer...

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then...

And here was the moment. The end of it all, for civilization was merely another name for friendship, and friendship was coming to an end.

Nations rise and fall, flourish and decay, by what they believe in and by what their culture stands for.

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or...

To many people I have no doubt that it appears merely silly. I once found it expressed in a rather amusing way in a Russian Book called Dal Zoviet, which means the lure of far...